To Paul Lansky — one of the first composers to use a machine as his primary instrument — the computer has been "a kind of aural camera in the world."

The phrase "computer music" can have many connotations. In contemporary classical music, it was once the province of abstract works associated with academia. In pop music, it can form the backbone of dance tracks or electronic meditations.

To Paul Lansky — one of the first composers to use a machine as his primary instrument — the computer has been "a kind of aural camera in the world."

"One of the things I did a lot of on the computer was try to duplicate sounds that we hear everyday — unmediated speech and environmental sounds," he says.

He has used his talents to fuse the natural and manmade sounds, incorporating elements ranging from the noise of his children clearing the table and cars driving to folk songs, Wagner opera and blues harmonica.

"It was a way to experiment with sounds and a way to try things that instruments couldn’t do," he says.

Lansky has spent the past 45 years on the faculty at Princeton University, where he also received his doctorate degree in music. His work — created for and by computers and also for more traditional instruments — has been successful on the concert stage and quoted in the Radiohead song "Idioteque."

At the end of this school year, he will retire from his teaching position.

"It’s time," he says. "I’ve been doing it long enough. I just feel I should make way for younger people."

Lansky plans to compose more, travel and relax. But first, on Saturday, Princeton will host a concert in honor of his achievements. The program will feature performances by So Percussion, guitarist David Starobin and the Janus Trio.

1966 arrival

"I came to Princeton because it was an excellent music department," says Lansky, who grew up in the Bronx and attended Queens College.

He arrived in 1966, and during his first week, none other than Igor Stravinsky arrived to premiere a new piece. In his first year, Lansky worked on chamber music and began experimenting with a computer — an IBM mainframe with one megabyte of memory.

As he describes writing his first piece in the ’60s, it took a year and a half and was thrown out as soon as it was done. To create his first computer works, he had to travel to Bell Labs in Murray Hill in order to hear what he had written. After that, he would drive home to start over, maybe stopping for ice cream along the way.

To imagine the process, he says to think about it like this:

"You hit a note on the piano and then you have to make an appointment. Then it takes a day or two before you realize you hit the wrong note."

Over time, he was able to do all his work at Princeton — when the process was still slow, some days until 2 a.m. — and eventually at home with a $10,000 Next Computer, Steve Jobs’ pre-Apple venture.

The first piece he felt truly proud of was his 1979 "Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion," which used his wife’s voice reading the English text, one of several works in which he manipulated natural sounds.

The work begins with a hazy idyll of drones and distorted speech, sighs and static. The voice echoes and the words slide and sway like a carnival ride. At times, the timbre of the speaking sounds almost like a theremin rather than a human and the words gradually begin to sound increasingly distant and harder to make out.

Eerie, elegiac and fleetingly reverent tones give way to the aggressive glints of metallic shards of sound. By the fifth movement, clattering and hissing recall the poem’s line "These dull notes we sing/Discords neede for helps to grace them," before it returns back to the easily identifiable sound of a regular, natural voice.

By the turn of the century, Lansky had begun to shift away from computers back to acoustic instruments.

"It was a life change," he says.

"I sort of got out of computer music at the point it became generally available and easy, but that had nothing to do with why I stopped doing it."

As he worked through using computers to create acoustic-like sounds, he says, "I found myself spinning my wheels."

"Instead of just trying to synthesize the violin, why not use the violin?" he thought.

classical background

His string writing, as well as the traditional classical background he developed growing up as a French horn player and guitarist, can be seen at work on the upcoming concert. The Janus trio, which includes violist Beth Meyers, flutist Amanda Baker and harpist Nuiko Wadden, will play his "Book of Memory."

The ensemble commissioned the piece, which consists of seven movements, each beginning with the music of a specific composer from all periods of music history. It also draws on text from William Blake’s "Song: Memory, hither come."

Writing for percussion also became a key part of Lansky’s transition. His "Threads," which includes a variety of timbres and rhythms that perhaps speak to his computer music experience, has become popular with ensembles nationwide and was recorded by So Percussion, who will perform the work on Saturday.

After percussionists requested arrangements of his "Table’s Clear," which draws on what he describes as "kitchen gamelan" sounds that came from a recording of his children collecting plates and silverware after dinner, he began to think about writing a new work instead.

"That turned out to feel a lot like computer music because the sounds are so varied and there’s so many of them," he says. "I had the same kind of complexity built into the electronic pieces because I could, and I wanted to keep them fresh in people’s ears."

Thinking about the "choreography" involved for live percussionists — what it might take to play a marimba and a woodblock at the same time, for example — proved a rewarding adjustment.

"I found it very exciting," he says.

It may seem that Lansky has crossed borders between the computer music world and traditional composition, but as he points out, it seems that those borders have evaporated.

"One thing that I said a long time ago was that basically I look forward to the time when using computers will not be a specialty, it will just be absorbed into the whole fabric of music," he says. "I think that’s pretty much what happened."